FROM THE ARCHIVES:The dire state of Dublin in the early 1980s was summed up in a supplement on developing the city. - JOE JOYCE
IT IS probable, in speaking of a physically declining Dublin, that anyone under thirty years of age will listen – if at all – with cynicism and some disbelief.
But for those who have entered the latter half of their lives, and who in younger days moved through the leisurely, even intimate, heart of the pre-sixties capital, Dublin, for all its bustle and noise, has changed irrevocably. And on the whole, much for the worse.
The easiest way though [sic] which to recognise the city’s shortcomings is to visit another capital city in another country, preferably European. Even London, for all its troubles, works as a city, the buses run reasonably to schedule, the tubes are swift and comprehensive, the taxis numerous and knowledgeable, the phones in order and the streets clean.
And London is not by a long way the most efficient of Europe’s capitals. Amsterdam or Brussels or Copenhagen are a bewilderment to anyone reared on Dublin’s chronic illnesses.
It is escapist to speak of a developing industrial Dublin without reference to the city’s major infrastructural problems – for these affect industry even more critically than almost anyone else.
So what is wrong with this city?
Its worst faults are transport ones – inadequate roads, lack of an implemented overall transport policy (despite what seems thousands of plans of one sort or another). Traffic is simply chaotic. The motorist blames the lorries and the buses; the busmen blame the motorist. Through it all the citizen must get to work.
Traffic chaos is not the entire problem. Dublin Port lies at the other end for heavy traffic using it; they must cross the city. But there is little that can be done about that, we’re stuck with it. And such lack of planning can be traced back not ten or fifteen years ago, but thirty or even fifty years when the lessons of larger and developing cities . . . were not absorbed in isolationist Ireland.
What should have been avoidable is the indecent exposure of Dublin’s gracious bones. It has been fashionable to espouse the cause of Georgian or even Viking Dublin; much of that public outrage is questionable, for what is old and decrepit must come down.
What is reprehensible and inexcusable is that so much of what has constituted Dublin’s charm and grace has had to be demolished – much of it through the cynical and selfish manipulation of planning restrictions by so-called property developers. Buying buildings, leaving them derelict for years, quietly removing a slate or two . . . to allow the elements to get to work, is too familiar a pattern to continue to be allowed . . .
There are – of course – responsible development companies who have done their best, either through conservation or through thoughtful and sympathetic renovation and even copying. But Dublin today, with vacant sites . . . and derelict buildings rapidly decaying, speaks mutely of the depredations of the cynical and grasping.